Hold the Scalpel, Appendix May Be Useful After All

Oct 07, 08:00 PM

Current Headlines: By O'RYAN JOHNSON

Tonsils, you're up next.

Duke University researchers have discovered a use for the presumed-useless comma on our large intestine: the appendix.

Apparently the growth is a sort of "safe house" used by good bacteria in the battlefield of our digestive tract. The good germs can hide in there while our bodies purge the bad germs in an ugly bowel-clearing process that happens when humans contract diseases such as cholera or dysentery, according to a study by Duke researchers in the Journal of Theoretical Biology.

Duke University Medical School professors said the wormish growth that measures between three-quarters of an inch to several inches long, is also a love nest for good bacteria where they breed and multiply.

However, when the growth becomes inflamed or infected it causes the potentially deadly condition known as appendicitis.

Word of the little dangly dude's usefulness led Gary Huffnagle, a University of Michigan internal medicine and microbiology professor, to wonder about the value of another body part that is often yanked: "I'll bet eventually we'll find the same sort of thing with the tonsils."

Originally published by By O'RYAN JOHNSON.

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